Synopses & Reviews
From a distance, on television, say, or in the pages of the business section, it looks like such a clean, well-lighted place a place where decisions to buy or sell are guided by formulas and subtle strategy, and thorough, dispassionate consideration of all available facts. A place where cool reason prevails. And sure, that's one version of Wall Street call it the CNBC edition. But this book is about another place, just beneath that shiny surface a place where fear and greed have always held sway. Think WorldCom or Tyco; think Enron. Think Gordon Gekko. Call it a doppelganger, a broken mirror-image, an evil twin. Call it Wall Street Noir.
Wall Street Noir, the latest addition to Akashic Books' acclaimed series of crime fiction anthologies, casts a stark light on the darkest ends of the Street, to illuminate a place whose boundaries have spread well beyond Trinity Church and the East River. In today's relentlessly global economy, Wall Street is everywhere: a borderless, virtual city encompassing Midtown Manhattan, Main Street, U.S.A., the maquilas of Honduras, the office towers of Shanghai, and the brothels of Bangkok. It's a shadowy metropolis, as the stories in this exciting collection reveal, and one that's far more Jim Thompson than Warren Buffet.
The volume's contributors range across this landscape in seventeen dark, sometimes darkly funny, tales of hungry egos, cutthroat competition, cultural clashes, sweaty paranoia, not-so-innocent bystanders, and desperate deals with a wide variety of devils.
Synopsis
--"At the Top of His Game" by Stephen Rhodes was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2008 anthology
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Brand-new stories by: John Burdett, Henry Blodget, Peter Blauner, Jason Starr, Megan Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, Stephen Rhodes, Twist Phelan, Tim Broderick, Jim Fusilli, David Noonan, Richard Aleas, Lawrence Light, James Hime, Mark Haskell Smith, Peter Spiegelman, and Lauren Sanders.
Synopsis
Brand new stories by: John Burdett, Henry Blodget, Peter Blauner, Jason Starr, Megan Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, Stephen Rhodes, Twist Phelan, Tim Broderick, Jim Fusilli, David Noonan, Richard Aleas, Lawrence Light, James Hime, Mark Haskell Smith, Peter Spiegelman, and Lauren Sanders.
Synopsis
Brand-new stories by: John Burdett, Peter Blauner, Charles Ardai, Henry Blodget, Twist Phelan, Larry Light, James Hime, Jason Starr, Lauren Sanders, Tim Broderick, Reed Farrel Coleman, Jim Fusilli, Mark Haskell Smith, and more.
Peter Spiegelman is the Shamus Award-winning author of Black Maps (Knopf, 2003), Deaths Little Helpers (Knopf, 2005), and Red Cat (Knopf, 2007), which feature private detective and Wall Street refugee John March. Spiegelman is a twenty-year veteran of the financial services and software industries, and has worked with banks, brokerage houses, and central banks in major markets around the world. He lives in Connecticut.
Synopsis
John Burdett, Peter Blauner, Henry Blodget and others take noir to The Street.
About the Author
Peter Spiegelman is the Shamus Award-winning author of Black Maps, Death's Little Helpers, and Red Cat (all published by Knopf), which feature private detective and Wall Street refugee John March. Mr. Spiegelman is a twenty-year veteran of the financial services and software industries, and has worked with banks, brokerage houses and central banks in major markets around the world. He lives in Connecticut.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Downtown
"At the Top of His Game" by Stephen Rhodes (40 Broad Street)
"A Trader's Lot" by Twist Phelan (1 North End Avenue)
"Feeding Frenzy" by Tim Broderick (40 Wall Street)
"A Terrorizing Demonstration" by Jim Fusilli (23 Wall Street)
"Town Car" by David Noonan (85 Exchange Place)
Part II: Uptown
"The Quant" by Richard Aleas (Times Square)
"Make Me Rich" by Lawrence Light (257 W. 36th Street)
"Rough Justice" by James Hime (200 Park Avenue)
"The Consultant" by Peter Blauner (1313 Avenue of the Americas)
Part III: Main Street
"The Day Trader in the Trunk of Cleto's Car" by Mark Haskell Smith (Los Angeles, California)
"Five Days at the Sunset" by Peter Spiegelman (Lethe, South Dakota)
"Today We Hit" by Megan Abbott (110 W. 139th Street)
"The Basher" by Jason Starr (Hoboken, New Jersey)
Part IV: Global Markets
"The Enlightenment of Magnus McKay" by John Burdett (Bangkok, Thailand)
"Bonus Season" by Henry Blodget (Shanghai, China)
"Everything I'm Not" by Lauren Sanders (Tel Aviv, Israel)
"Due Diligence" by Reed Farrel Coleman (Tegucigalpa, Honduras)
About the Contributors
Author Q&A
Q&A with Wall Street Noir editor Peter Spiegelman
Q: Where did the idea for Wall Street Noir come from?
A: The idea for Wall Street Noir grew out of a view I've long held based on nearly twenty years of working there that Wall Street is actually quite a noir-ish place, a social crucible that is much more Jim Thompson than Warren Buffet. This runs contrary to many popular notions, I know, and to the public image of a well-scrubbed, rational, even glamorous place that the Street likes to project, but when you consider the big money, dysfunctional egos, cutthroat competition, class struggle, desperation, and sweaty paranoia that wash around there, it's less of a stretch.
My desire with this anthology was to collect stories that in one way or another illuminated the dark end of the Street. I was looking not so much for tales of glitz, glamour and masters of the universe as I was stories about desperate measures in pursuit of that glitz, or the corrosive, distorting effects of proximity to so much excess, or self-deception, or the people who get ground up in the well-oiled gears, or deals with the devil. I'd admired Akashic's crime fiction list, and thought its Noir series might be a great vehicle for what I had in mind. (Akashic publisher) Johnny Temple and I had a talk, and happily he agreed.
Q: You say in the introduction to Wall Street Noir that Wall Street has long been a crime scene. Why do you think that is?
A: In this day and age post-Enron, post-Adelphia, post endless insider-trading and conflict of interest cases it's hardly breaking news that there's crime on Wall Street. Financial wrongdoing didn't start there, of course, but it found fertile ground on the Street, and its roots run pretty deep. As to why I'm not sure Wall Street criminals are ultimately so different from other varieties: they're some combination of greedy, scared, desperate, and reckless. And of course there's the fact that (to paraphrase Willie Sutton) Wall Street is where the money is. But I think there's more to the story than inclination and proximity.
Pressure is certainly a part of the Wall Street equation. People with P&L responsibility on the Street are under enormous pressure to generate revenue. Success can bring immense wealth, and failure can end careers. For some of these people, more than just run-of-the-mill avarice is at work. For them, money is merely a proxy for larger, more existential stakes. Failure doesn't only put big bonuses at risk, but their sense of self as well.
Corporate culture is another factor. Crime doesn't occur in a vacuum it's encouraged (on Wall Street or any place else) when supervision is lax, and enforcement and penalties are perceived to be mild. Firms with slipshod controls, or whose managements focus on the generation of revenue to the exclusion of all else, often send ambiguous don't ask, don't tell signals to their employees, and tacit messages about what kind of behavior is and isn't acceptable in the pursuit of profit.
Q: Your contributors are an interesting mix: some veteran crime writers, some journalists, some Wall Street professionals, even a graphic novelist. Was this intentional?
A: It was indeed. I wanted different perspectives on Wall Street from both insiders and outsiders and so the collection includes authors who've worked (or still work) on Wall Street, authors who've followed (or still follow) Wall Street for a living, and authors who've had no experience on the Street, but are interested observers. A varied bunch, but they all had great insight into the noir aspects of the place, and they all delivered great stories.
Q: With such a varied group of authors, did any of the stories surprise you?
A: I'm really very pleased with all of the stories, but a number of them did surprise me in good ways, I'm happy to say. When the project started, I wouldn't have predicted that the collection would include an historical story, but it turned out to have two of them (from Jim Fusilli and Megan Abbott). And while I had high hopes for the book's graphic story (by Tim Broderick), the final product exceeded my expectations in terms of its immediacy, impact, and wit. More than anything, though, I was surprised by just how much humor (decidedly dark humor) some of these stories have. I expected dark and gritty, and I expected social commentary, but I didn't expect funny.
Q: Other volumes in Akashic's Noir series focus on specific cities, and are organized by city neighborhoods; Wall Street Noir seems like something of a departure.
I don't think it's a big departure. The books in the Noir series were conceived of as crime fiction travel guides to various cities, and Johnny Temple was appropriately insistent on maintaining that focus with Wall Street Noir. That made sense to me, as one of the things I wanted to explore was the fact that Wall Street has expanded far beyond its original roots, to become what is in effect a global city. So, consistent with the rest of the Noir series, Wall Street Noir is organized according to the "neighborhoods" of this virtual city. Those neighborhoods just happen to cover a lot of geography.
Q: Is the collection aimed at Wall Street insiders, or can outsiders appreciate these stories as well?
A: While Wall Street folks will certainly enjoy the "inside baseball" aspects of some of the pieces, the book is definitely not just for insiders. The collection will appeal to a pretty broad range of readers, I think, regardless of whether they know the difference between a stock and a bond.